


emigration tunes

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-02
Updated: 2016-02-02
Packaged: 2018-05-17 18:51:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5881717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lillian dies and Eileen gives up on Ireland, takes the truck and the interstates instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	emigration tunes

 

Deafness and Irishness go together just about as well as oil and water. She always got that impression.

 

She's touching thirty and still hasn't clapped eyes on much more of Ireland than pictures Lillian kept of their hometowns: tumbledown hills of stone cottages that have been in the same place, more or less, for hundreds of years, muddy dark roads, sheep scattered around dandelion weed—not much to look at, which is all Eileen can do. Doesn't look Irish, not like the postcard girls with the crazy wiry copper hair and their faces painted with freckles, _fair colleens:_ Eileen is under no illusions that she is pretty. Lillian used to braid her hair, make shapes in the mirror with her mouth. _Lovely girl,_ she'd say, and at least in part Eileen could feel the vibration of her voice through her hands. Never believed her.

* * *

 

So much of Ireland is—was—is about hearing it, about the music, the pipes too high for her to feel, and she doesn't know what _lilting_ is, can't imagine it. And growing up Stateside in the passenger seat of Lillian's eaten, bullet-pocked Ford she feels closer to the right side of the road than she has ever felt to that distant clump of land floating on the cold black sea, the place she is apparently from. There's no such thing as heritage here, though Lillian tries her best to make her remember. But there isn't much to remember. Kelly green doesn't exist in America, not in the way Lillian would like it to. And Eileen isn't much for dancing. Has no real interest in understanding the way thunder comes across the moors, or the sound of grass under bare feet, and hates how hard it is to read Irish on Lillian's lips. It all looks like gibberish to her. English has syllables, consonants, it feels real and hard and cold and good. But Lillian slips in and out, can't help it, grew up too close to the Earth, has never looked sadder than when Eileen can't read her mouth, but there's no way to learn, not sounds like that.

* * *

 

Eileen likes America—likes billboards and newspapers and neon signs. Everything is advertised here, everything is written. If you can't hear it they'll tell you a million times otherwise, otherhow. She likes the South especially, the Bible Belt, where every other sign is telling her that JESUS LOVES her, even if she doesn't particularly believe in Jesus. She collects, though Lillian throws out her collections whenever she can, labels from soup cans and water bottles, receipts and parking tickets from other people's cars, church flyers and missing flyers and lost pet flyers. America isn't so much about hearing. All about seeing. If she compares her body to the billboard models in the mirror, so be it. They live high over the road and they don't go barefoot in the grass and no one would ever call them _fair colleens,_ good girls.

 

She's glad she can't hear Ireland when America is enough for her. When she was young Lillian would make shapes into the phone and her face would draw down in pain and Eileen would close her eyes and imagine the rumble of bombs in Belfast going through her bones. Lillian's a Catholic and Eileen doesn't know what she is though she's dragged to church every Sunday, hell or high water. She gets the impression that the humble ceilings here are nothing like the places Lillian remembers in the old country. And she doesn't miss the flinching, doesn't bother to ask about the trouble back home when it means absolutely nothing to her. People die for God everywhere. Her parents didn't, and that's the difference.

* * *

 

Lillian tells her that she's Irish, that she's got to hold onto it. And yes, she'll put on her medals, Pádraig and Brigid, and she'll read the stories, dream about the heroes, pretend she understands, because Lillian cares about the past, about where she's rooted, because tumors are crowding Lillian's throat and they'll kill her, but they won't kill Eileen. At Lillian's bedside in the middle of New Mexico where everything is dying she tries to remember anything she can, out of some sense of duty. But there's nothing, though she's been told a thousand times about the cot and her parents' bodies and the blood coming from her ears. She can't remember the face of the thing that cost her her sound. Why does it matter? She shouldn't have to make it matter.

 

Lillian dies and she gives up on Ireland, takes the truck and the interstates instead.

* * *

 

She likes the feeling of the old music, the lyrics of which she only knows from the clumsy movement of Lillian's lips. Her mouth runs in Eileen's dreams, silently, because there's no other way, whispering _The Parting Glass,_ _Caide Sin Don Té Sin?_ None of it means anything to her. Just certain percussions that meant something to someone she loved. She tries to feel it, the emigration tunes, the famine and Troubles that are rightfully in her Irish bones, tries to feed the music rumbling against her hand into her bloodstream; but only for Lillian—not for herself.

 

How can she be Irish? How can that mean something to her when she has never heard her own Gaeilge name on anyone's tongue? When she's never heard a breath of song or thunder coming in over the moors or _The Wind That Shakes the Barley_ — and three Protestants were gunned down four miles north of the place where the _bean sí_ curled over the corpses of her parents and neither made noise or news beyond the edges of the village, and everyone forgot her by the time she was three years old and making shapes on the floor of a motel in Washington?

 

She's deaf, and the language she speaks is American. She'll never go back.

* * *

 

Sam doesn't try to speak to her in Gaelic. This strikes her, though hardly anyone has tried to speak to her in Gaelic since Lillian died, her esophagus too closed-up to form any words, let alone the Irish ones. Most people don't know she hails from anywhere but here. The accent he picks up on isn't any bullshit facsimile; she never tried to grow one. It's her accent, her voice, her own cultivation. He tries to thank her with his hand and approximates __fuck you__ instead, a mistake that makes her laugh inside.

 

Somehow—she'd imagined a hunter, especially a man, might try, to establish some kind of hierarchy. Instead he sits comfortably at her level, even after she tries to stab him in the throat. Respects her, so she respects him.

 

Sam and Dean don't expect her to be Irish. Mildred doesn't, either. Between them all she feels a certain tightening in her skin, a freedom from Lillian's braids and twisted silent words. _Eileen,_ capable with a golden blade, and close to leaving the island behind forever.

 

The spiel Sam gives her, on revenge and hate—she watches him give it, doesn't need to tell him to stop, that she's told it all to herself before. She thinks perhaps it's something he needs to say, more to himself than to her.

* * *

 

Every so often she emails him, to see how he's holding up. Eileen likes email in the same way that she likes the billboards and the newspapers and the neon signs. Black letters on white body, real and hard and cold and good. He tells her he's been listening to Irish music, when he gets to thinking about her.

 

Eileen tells him: she doesn't care for the music unless she's thinking of Lillian, wants to feel something in the palms of her hands; doesn't care for Ireland much at all. But it's nice to be thought about.

 

He asks her if she'd ever go back. Says he's been to Scotland, once, which isn't the same thing or even close, and doesn't want to cross the Atlantic again any time soon. He likes America, he says, for all its flaws.

 

She asks him what he likes about it. She's curious. She's already told him what she likes: the sprawl of towns with single stoplights, the desert from the window of her pickup, rain in Appalachia; an entire world across any number of miles. She's an immigrant, a traveler, like him, she thinks, like both of them.

 

 _Winchester_ is an English name for an American gun.

 

He writes back that he likes driving on the right side of the road. Likes how the air is clear—most places.

 

 


End file.
